Surface Detail

“Are you trapped?” the doll repeated, fiddling with something just outside of sight. “Yes, Yime, I’m afraid you are.” She felt and half-saw it flick the long silver line, then felt something cold on the other side of her neck. She sensed a needle sliding into her flesh but there was no pain at all; not even the slightest, which was surprising. She was sure you were supposed to experience a tiny bit of pain with anything the body experienced as an injury, before the pain-relief system kicked in. Unless your whole body was basically in screaming agony and therefore your brain was so flooded with pain-relief secretions coming from the appropriate glands and just-ignore-it signals coming from the relevant brain-bits that something as trivial as a needle sliding into your flesh just didn’t register at all.

That must be it. She was crushed, immobile, inside the crippled ship, barely able to breathe, and her body was probably really badly smashed up. Made sense.

She was taking all this very calmly, she thought.

Well, there wasn’t much point in panicking.

She swallowed, then said, “Ot the suck ha’ind?”

“What the fuck happened?” the doll said, finishing what it was doing and climbing back out from beside her neck and standing in front of her again. It stood a little further back now so she could see it better. “I – we – got clobbered by something very powerful: either the Bulbitian itself displaying hitherto unknown martial prowess, or an equiv-tech ship that was nearby. We only just got out of the Bulbitian’s environment sphere. I had to total

– go into hyperspace – before I cleared the sphere, or we’d have been smeared. It was a rough old transit and we were still getting attacked. Got off some retaliation but no idea if I hit anything. More frazzling ensued before I could get us away. Took myself to bits; firing off burst units like missiles and p-chambers like mines. Lost 4D directional and had to traction-plough the grid to stop us subrupturing. Now we’re drifting, decoupled.”

“Oor juss a-oyding saying yeer sucked.”

“No I’m not,” the doll squeaked. “We are fucked, in the sense we’re both in a very bad way, but on the other hand we are alive at the moment, and we have a substantial chance of getting out of this alive.”

“Ee do?”

“We do. Thanks to my efforts and your body’s own emergency systems we can keep you stabilised and even start some repairs, meanwhile I seem to have shaken off our attackers, my own repair systems are running at maximum and the distress calls I got out before losing my signal fields, plus the ablation plume itself, should have been sufficient to summon help. I expect it is on its way even as we speak.”

She tried to frown. It was just about possible. “I a doll?”

“All my other remotes are compromised, too big or otherwise engaged. The doll dates from when I once had some children aboard. Rather than recycle it I retained it in this form for sentimental reasons. I’ll leave it here to keep you company if you want to stay awake, though it might be better to let you sleep now we’ve got you hooked up; going to be a while before I can get you unstuck.”

She thought about this. “Slee,” she said.

Just before she slipped under, she thought, Wait! There had been something important she’d really meant to remember.

But then it all went away from her.

“That thing’s coming up on me,” Demeisen said, frowning. “What the fuck does it think it’s trying to do; overtake?”

“You’re sure it’s not a missile?” Lededje asked. She’d got the ship to put the image back on the module screen again so she could at least see something of what was going on immediately behind them. The granular two-tone greyness in the screen’s centre looked just as it had.

“Whatever this thing is, I doubt it considers itself single-use expendable, so not a missile by the standard definition,” the avatar said. “But it is coming straight up behind us, which is a semi-hostile manoeuvre.”

“When does it become a totally hostile manoeuvre?”

Demeisen shrugged. “When it reaches a point where a Torturer-class ROU would normally catch sight of something immediately behind it. At the moment it thinks I can’t see it, so in a sense I’ve no business assuming it’s hostile. As soon as or slightly before it reaches the point where a real Torturer class would spot it, it should hail us.”

“When does that happen?”